A WIDOWER has lost a bid for at least £250,000 compensation over the death of his wife two weeks after she gave birth at Harrow’s Northwick Park Hospital.

Ome Shah, 37, gave birth to fourth child Zamin just a fortnight before she died of an “extremely rare” episode of spontaneous internal bleeding in January 2010.

Widower Asmat Ali Shah sued the North West London Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs the hospital in Watford Road, Harrow, but on Wednesday last week Judge Andrew Collender rejected the claim, calling it “speculative”.

The court heard Mrs Shah, who studied law at college and worked for the Natwest bank until becoming a full-time mother, gave birth to Zamin on January 13 2010 without difficulty and was apparently in good health thereafter.

However, on the afternoon of January 23 2010, she began to complain of pain in her head and lower abdomen and had a restless night.

Her husband told the court in a written witness statement: “[She] said something was happening to her, that she felt something wrong in her tummy.

“Quickly I held her in my arms but the next moment she went into a fit and collapsed. She twisted her right arm and lost her speech.

“It seemed as if she had a stroke.”

Mrs Shah was taken to the hospital by ambulance where the Dr Thomas, a locum doctor working in A&E department, found her to be in shock and gave her intravenous fluids.

However, the patient’s condition worsened and she died after spending some time in intensive care.

Mr Shah’s compensation claim was based on the belief the mother-of-four’s life could have been saved if the physician had taken her pulse correctly and noted a loss of sensation in the right leg that would have indicated something was amiss and therefore emergency surgery was needed.

But Mr Collender wrote in his judgment: “The case that had Dr Thomas palpated Mrs Shah’s peripheral pulses in the course of her second assessment life saving surgery would have been performed on Mrs Shah before 2pm is highly speculative and is certainly not established on the evidence before me.

“There was no reason for Dr Thomas to think that Mrs Shah had suffered a haemorrhage or that her arterial flow was compromised, considering the agreed evidence of the extreme rarity of spontaneous arterial haemorrhage.

“There was no reason for her to believe that palpating Mrs Shah’s peripheral pulses was a necessary test for her to perform or that the surgical team should be involved at that stage in the care of Mrs Shah.

“I consider that the claimant’s evidence does not establish a breach of duty by Dr Thomas in her care of Mrs Shah.”